Social media has taught us the importance of excellent customer experiences. From slow websites to poor customer service, you can expect that annoyed, frustrated, or angry customers will post online about their interactions with your brand. They’ll share stories of customer support representatives that could have been more helpful, photos of products that don’t work as expected, and their overall impression of your brand. Today’s consumers may not always tell the business about a negative experience, but that doesn’t mean they keep the information to themselves.
According to word-of-mouth marketing statistics, 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain to the company about a bad experience; however, they share their bad experience with about 9-15 people. Additionally, customers are 50% more likely to share bad experiences than good ones.
This statistic is notable because word-of-mouth recommendations remain one of the most credible forms of advertisement. According to a global survey by Nielsen in 2021, 88% of consumers trusted recommendations from people they know above all other forms of marketing messaging.
If you want to grow your business, you have to focus on providing a positive customer experience. And as our stats have proven, it’s not enough to listen to the customers who complain. To help you create a great customer experience strategy, we’re highlighting a few proven methods for creating positive experiences for your customers.
Table of Contents
6 Proven Methods to Improve Your Customer Experience Strategy
1. Get to Know Your Customers
To provide a good customer experience, you’ll need to know who your customers are and what they want. Understanding your customers involves developing an excellent buyer persona and customer journey map.
To create buyer personas, use analytics to get data on your customer’s demographics, behavior, and interests. Knowing your customers better will help you tailor the customer experience to meet their expectations and improve customer service. If you haven’t reviewed your buyer persona in a while, take some time to make sure it is still accurate.
2. Personalize the Customer Experience
Personalizing customer interactions effectively creates a meaningful and lasting relationship between the brand and the buyer. Create happy customers by developing personalized experiences. Personalization makes them feel valued, and customer satisfaction increases, making them more likely to become loyal to a specific business. Personalization may include exclusive vouchers or discounts tailored to specific buying habits after the first few purchases to show them the value of returning again and again.
Personalization can also take on other forms, such as tailored recommendations based on individual preferences, automated messages offering tips or product suggestions when completing certain online activities, or unique rewards programs that encourage continued loyalty among buyers. Providing users with a seamless customer service experience is vital to creating meaningful connections between personalization techniques used by businesses and the customers they serve. Ultimately, ensuring the customer feels seen and heard even after the sale can go a long way toward boosting the overall customer experience.
3. Reward Customer Loyalty
Having a great customer experience is critical to earning customer loyalty. But, once they’re loyal, customers want to continue to receive rewards for purchases from your brand rather than a competitor. Customer loyalty programs that allow customers to earn points and rewards for shopping are great tools for rewarding repeat customers. You can also reward customer loyalty by sending discounts, offering samples of new products, and personalizing the messages you send in emails.
4. Turn Your Employees into Advocates for Your Customers
Your customer service teams should not be the only employees focusing on making customers happy. To create a great customer experience, every person in the sales process needs to put customers first. Creating a customer-centric culture can help foster a company where every employee advocates for a better customer experience.
5. Create Helpful Content for Your Customers
Customers ask questions about your brand at every stage of their buyer’s journey. By taking the time to research the top questions your ideal customers are searching for and answering them with clear and helpful videos, infographics, and blog articles, you will establish yourself as an industry expert. The more questions you answer for your customers, the more likely they will continue to look to you as new questions or problems arise. Still trying to figure out where to start? Look at the entire customer journey and ensure you have content that answers questions for each stage.
Related article: How Does Content Marketing Work?
6. Reply to Customer Reviews
Whether you know it or not, your customers talk about you on your Google Business Profile and social media. They share their positive and negative experiences with your brand. Show them you’re paying attention to their comments, compliments, or concerns by posting thoughtful responses.
Social media has become the customer’s preferred channel to communicate with brands, becoming a considerable part of the buyer’s journey. You must incorporate social media into your customer experience strategy to deliver excellent customer service.
Implementing a great customer experience strategy takes time. Still, when done well, you can increase your opportunities to extend customer relationships beyond their initial purchase and turn potential customers into loyal fans.
Don’t Ignore Customer Relationship Management
As industry competition increases, you may experience natural customer churn. However, there’s always room to review your current processes and see if there are additional ways you can increase your customer retention. If you need help aligning your customer experiences with your marketing strategy, our team of experts can help. Contact us to learn how SMA Marketing can partner with you to create a well-rounded internet marketing strategy.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on May 2, 2019, and has been updated with fresh content.
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